Customer Reviews

The Octopus: A Story of California (Twentieth Century Classics) (v. 1)

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Based on an actual incident, "The Octopus" is set in the San Joaquin Valley of central California towards the end of the 19th century -- not long before it was written. It concerns a dispute between the Pacific & Southwestern Railroad (in historical reality, the Southern Pacific) which owns the land it runs through and the tenant wheat ranchers who farm it. For one thing, the ranchers would like to own the land by buying it off the railroad, but the railroad raises the price per acre to exorbitant levels in violation of a previous contract; also, the ranchers are protesting the railroad's monopolistic policy of charging high freight rates for shipping wheat, which cuts into their profits.

The characterization of the novel is rather straightforward. The "heroes" are the ranchers, which include "Governor" Magnus Derrick, an ostensibly upstanding politician; Broderson, an ineffectual old man; Osterman, a loudmouthed joker; Annixter, an irascible and obstinate misogynist; and an engineer named Dyke who starts his own hops business after being laid off by the railroad. The author himself is presumably represented by a third-party observer named Presley, a poet who lives on the Derrick ranch and is using the scenery and the conflict as inspiration. The "villain" is, of course, the railroad, which is personified by a porcine banker named S. Behrman who acts as the railroad's agent and mouthpiece and whose frequent insensitivity and cruelty reduces him to a simplistic caricature.

The ranchers decide that the best way to keep the railroad's freight rates under control is to elect their own officials to the state Railroad Commission, which would entail bribery; after all, the railroad practically owns the Commission as it is. Despite their getting the Governor's son, Lyman Derrick, to represent them on the Commission, the ranchers' scheme proves ineffective. The railroad ultimately offers the wheat land for sale at the raised prices and sends "dummy" buyers out to dispossess the ranchers, who arm themselves to defend their homes. The result is a shockingly violent confrontation that shakes Presley's sentiments to the core.

"The Octopus" has some elements that I found distracting, puzzling, or faulty. First, there is not just one but *two* romantic subplots: Annixter's difficult courtship with a girl whose family works on his ranch (but at least we see how his marriage transforms his character positively and plausibly); and the shepherd/spiritualist Vanamee's incomprehensible nightly summonings of the ghost of his long-lost love Angele. Some of the dialogue is rendered flaccid by the use of euphemisms -- it's unbelievable that Annixter would refrain from calling Behrman anything worse than a "pip." The unctuous tone it applies to its oppressed-worker-vs.-corporate-monster theme is similar to the approach Steinbeck would use almost forty years later in "The Grapes of Wrath."

Despite its obvious flaws, however, "The Octopus" manages to be an exemplary work of American literature. The subject matter is unique and necessary for its time, and the commercial and legal aspects of the conflict are treated with maturity and confidence. It uses the perpetual production of wheat as a metaphor for the continuous cycle of the good of the earth prevailing over the evil of men. But most importantly, it achieves the highest purpose of a novel about business: It examines the integrity and resolve of men faced with financial ruin.

Definitely not for all tastes, but a strong work, with well-drawn characters and some very beautiful (albeit long) prose passages. Norris has a habit of driving his point into the ground (a section near the end of the novel, which juxtaposes a mother and child starving to death on the street with a wealthy, upperclass, elitist meal comes to mind), but over all a profound and powerful work. Originally intended as the first part of a proposed "Trilogy of Wheat," Norris died near the publication of the second book (see "The Pit.") Definitely recommended for those who enjoy great American literature.

Today when we think of California we think of what else but Los Angeles and San Francisco. Many people forget that California has a rich history based in agriculure and mining. The Octopus tells a story about California's past and the epic struggle between the Wheat farmers and the all powerful railroads. The characters are dynamic and Norris has written the story so brilliantly that you actually feel for the characters. If you read this book you also must read "The Pit" also by Norris which tells the tale of the Chicago Commodities market and one mans overpowering desire to "corner" the wheat market.

This is the first of Frank Norris's books that I have ever read, and my God is it great. The characters are so real and the manner in which they are described brings them to full life. Upon the death of the characters, the characters that the reader has grown to love, the reader mourns for them. They make the reader laugh and they inspire love and hatred. The truth brought about by The Octopus, that of the ultimate good, dwarfs the adjunct, impersonal truths carried on by some other literary "masterpieces". For such an unknown masterpiece, this one is a pearl. The writing is masterful and the story is golden. While it may seem that a story about the railroad in Old California may be tiring, Norris captures the same Escapist qualities that authurs such as J.R.R. Tolkien are recongnized for(Tolkien is fantasy, Norris is reality). The naturalist sting of the novel does not at all take away, but butresses the novel. The Octopus, a masterpiece, simply brilliant.

In his most ambitious work, turn-of-the-century novelist Norris tackles the railroad in this unflinching view of how the industrial revolution pushed the common man to the side in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Violent naturalism the way it's supposed to be: disturbing yet beautifully rendered.

Prolixity, thy name is Norris ! My edition of 448 pages says that it has been edited. I would have been interested to know in what way because Norris is nothing if not verbose and repetitive. Add a healthy dose of 19th century idealistic, rosy romanticism, a bit of extra-sensory perception, communication with "shades", melodramatic deaths, and some old Anglo-Saxon racial prejudices and one would think, "Bob, why did you bother ?"

But you would be wrong. Though his earlier novel, "McTeague" is probably his best work, Norris comes close, in many ways, to his idol, Zola, in creating a realistic portrait of a whole time, a whole area, a whole way of life. The time is late 19th century, the place, central California's San Joaquin Valley, and the way of life the one centered around wheat production. No detail escapes the author's eye---the tools, the land, the houses, the railroads, the dialogues, the flowers and animals. His characters are most lifelike, real people who will stay with you for a long time. The railway, whose many tentacles sucked the blood out of farmers through freight rates and crooked land deals, is the Octopus of the title. The vast production of the fertile valley is chased, rounded up, and cornered by the railway monopoly despite the best efforts of a group of wheat farmers to prevent it. They fight the railway by means of clean politics, dirty politics, and ultimately through violence. The story is a gripping one, no less than Zola's "Germinal", but differing from the latter because California was such a different environment from a French coal miners' town. Class existed---it was not so binding as in Europe---but those at the lower end still lived extremely precariously, as Norris shows.

You could say that three young men; one a farmer, the other two intellectuals or dreamers, make up the main characters. One tries to fight the Octopus and pays the price. The second remains what he has always been-an introspective dreamer with no thought of creation, only trying to re-create the past to link up with a dead love. He sees more clearly than the other two even so. The third is perhaps closest to Norris himself, an upper class urban intellectual cast into this battle of Titans. He writes poetry expressing his overwrought emotions, he tries to give inflammatory speeches, he even throws a bomb. He remains peripheral, sailing off to India at the end, not having succeeded in anything, forced by the web of class and social obligation to be closer and more beholden to the capitalist owners of the railroad than to his erstwhile comrades. Yes, you could say this. But I think the main characters in this flawed but great novel are the wheat and the railroad which determine the lives of many, forces greater than any one man. A pity Norris died at the age of 32. He might eventually have won a Nobel Prize, but for sure he would be remembered as one of the greatest American writers.

I have just this hour finished reading The Octopus. I can think of few novels that have filled me with such emotion and inspiration and sadness. It is rare that the "epic novel" truly lives up to the depth and scope of that description, especially in the dour, moralistic literature of the late nineteenth century, the period from which this novel emerged. Almost 100 years old, The Octopus had me glued to the pages, crying for the characters and moved beyond belief. It is one of the finest works in the history of the novel form, in my opinion. Its characters are real, flawed, vulnerable and tough; its plot an intriguing, awesome tragedy. And its heart is so completely in the right place. Norris's wisdom is still so relevant today. Everyone must read this book.

Frank Norris' The Octopus is a riveting, densely-written epic tale of the struggle of ranchers and workers to wrest control of their land and their lives away from the stranglehold of the Pacific and South Western Railroad. As a cautionary tale of the wages of untrammeled monopoly capitalism, it should be required reading for all first-year business school students and anyone else who believes in free markets. The glimpses it provides into gilded-age corporate obeisance to growth, as though it were an elemental Force that was a mysterious end in itself, may illuminate beliefs that still hold sway today.

Victimized farmers in Frank Norris's novel The Octopus are opinionated, vain, short-sighted, and irrational. Their decision to use the same unethical means as their enemies is understandable despite the wish of some to be honest because their enemies were not. Victimizing businessmen are opinionated and vain, but, they are far-sighted and rational. They know the law is on their side.

Descriptions of room interiors, acres of wheat, deserts, and mission gardens help the author to secure his effects. Their too long speeches show how inept farmers are at understanding their predicaments.

Force intrigues Norris. . . the wheat seed that germinates in the earth, the velocity of a railroad locomotive, the energy of a corporate machine. Norris sides with farmers (whom he says must be Anglo-Saxon!) and despises trusts --- the octopus --- composed of executives and their subordinates who make money and cause suffering by cheating their tenants and bribing court and government officials.

Characters in The Octopus are larger than life, episodes go to excess in depicting man's cruelty to man, criticisms of city people who love art are derived from ignorance, interludes of caricature lack the bite of satire, and incidents, such as the floundering of a man overcome by desire who fears women or the pathos of a lover who wants to unite with his dead love, detract from themes of agricultural fertility as salvation and the pursuit of corporate profit as damnation. Norris scurries away from a summons to insurrection while his concluding sentence: "all things inevitably, resistlessly work together for good," calls for a faith in progress and God events in the novel disprove.

I read The Octopus when I was 13 after buying and
reading the Classics Illustrated comic book version
of it (very well-done, I might add). I think it's
fine and gripping novel with sharply drawn charac-
ters and an important theme.

Its flaws seem to be these: a pseudo-mystical subplot
involving Vanamee the sheepherder doesn't work and
seems out of place. Some of the writing is over-
wrought. And Norris's conclusion that "all things
work together for good" is absurd, given the story
he has just told. The problem is, Norris started
the book intending it as an indictment of the rail-
road: fiction as special pleading. Presley's meet-
ing with Shelgrim, the railroad magnate, is an attempt
to balance this view (sort of). The ranchers engaged in
bribery and vote-buying and are by no means guiltless.
The failure of the novel's ending shows Norris's limits
as a writer (and thinker). Presley's rumination at the
book's end should have focused on the bitter irony of
the good the wheat might accomplish out of all the ruin
and suffering surrounding its production. But Norris felt
he had to make the "big statement". He makes it, but its
optimism has been completely undercut and made almost laughable
by the tragic story that we have just read. Many readers will
finish the book thinking "So, in short, all of this corruption
and death means nothing in the long run because, ALL things work
together for good." Replace that conclusion with something a
little more realistic such as that out of suffering and tragedy
some good may come sometimes (emphasis on some and sometimes).

Norris travelled on Realism Road until he saw where it was taking
him so he took an abrupt exit onto All Good Avenue, an artistic
and philosophical Dead End street if there ever was one.

Even so, it's still a GREAT book. And if you haven't read it you
should. Easily worth 10,000 Da Vinci Codes.